Exerpts from the Review of the Mary E. Rawlyk Exhibition

by Elissa Barnard

The CHRONICLE – HERALD    THE MAIL – STAR  1986
at Mount St. Vincent University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia

(…)Rawlyk speaks from her 25 years of experience as a homemaker.  She expresses the frustrations of the isolated housewife in prints of aprons and prints of her own face trapped inside a measuring cup or a carton of eggs.

In Rawlyk’s hands, the apron is a brilliant symbol for women trapped in the home. The aprons in her monoprints are faded, every wrinkle and stitch is visible, and they appear like dried, crushed flowers. Spots of  glowing orange/yellow colour in the aprons are the only expression of anger and life.

Rawlyk, who works in her home in Kingston, Ontario, uses the ties as arms, sometimes with colour Xerox hands attached, and the aprons become women expressing anger, devotion, futility and exhaustion. Two hands at the ends of a bow grab in a kind of scream towards the Apron’s skirt in grey Struggling Apron; in the ironic Pink Proposal Apron, Rawlyk expresses how young women’s dreams of romance have historically ended in domestic drudgery. Here the apron’s arms rest on the hips of a skirt which contains an embroidered sampler-like, scene of a gentleman talking to a lady.

More direct than the Apron Series, is the witty and emotionally charged Housewife Series, brought about in 1981 when Rawlyk accidentally dropped a photograph of her face into a measuring cup.  Rawlyk makes the photograph, in which she looks tired and burdened, part of kitchen objects to “show how women become incorporated into their domestic labour.” she writes in the catalogue essay. Her prints, with a stark black and white background, of her face imprisoned behind a cake rack or trapped on a shortening package’s label are comic and scary.

Rawlyk, whose show is organized by the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, is important as a voice for women who have long been silent.